When their father’s employer died, the Lamb family moved to Holborn, in London. In fact the first Lamb’s poems that ever appeared in print were published as an appendix to a book of poems by Samuel Coleridge. While he was at Christ’s Hospital young Charles Lamb formed a friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge – later to become a great poet – which was to last all their lives.

Charles was always hungry, and it was a common sight to see him dressed in a long blue coat, with mustard-coloured socks and brightly buckled black shoes, hanging on the railings of the playground waiting for his visitors to appear with a basket of food and cakes. When he was seven Charles went to Christ’s Hospital, the famous Blue Coat School at Horsham in Sussex, and Mary, now seventeen years old, stayed at home sewing and mending. But only their eldest brother John survived out of all their other brothers and sisters. Instead he made writing a part-time occupation and, because of the need to look after his mentally sick sister, he remained a clerk of the East India Company for thirty-three years.Ĭharles was the youngest son and Mary – her real name was Mary-Ann – the eldest daughter of seven children, all of whom were born in the Temple, in the heart of London.

For Charles Lamb could have been one of the greatest writers Britain produced in the nineteenth century. The lives of Charles and Mary Lamb provide one of the greatest stories in English literature of the love of a man for his sister. Charles and Mary Lamb – close companions in death as they were in life

Charles and mary lamb